politics

Dirty Clintons

Obama Proves How Dirty The Clintons Are

Defenders are quick to say that the Clintons’ many scandals only stem from them being attacked more than anyone else. Obama’s history rebukes that.

The Clintons’ ever-present mess is their fault, time and time again.

Defenders of Billary Clinton are quick to argue that the true source of the family’s many scandals isn’t any wrongdoing, but a dogged Republican attempt to nail them for something. Anything.

It’s a joke. And anyone who seriously believes it is either looking for a job in the White House or has their head further up their ass than the Republicans. A moral indictment of the Clintons doesn’t rest on any one scandal, although some have been more obvious than others. It rests on repeated patterns of behavior — kind of like how Bill couldn’t give up his woman habit even when he came under presidential scrutiny.

Take Hillary Clinton’s trading scandal. In the late seventies, the then-First Lady of Arkansas turned a $1,000 investment in cattle futures into $100,000 — a trading success with odds around 1 in 31 trillion — at the advice of a family friend. Oh: uh, who was also the top lawyer at Tyson Foods, a company that enjoyed favorable rulings, executive placement on state boards, and $9 million in state loans from Governor Clinton. Now, it’s possible that Hillary Clinton simply had the greatest 10-month trading run in finance history and then abruptly decided to call it quits, or it was some kind of sweetheart deal. You tell me.

Hillary deflected all inquiry into the matter onto the lawyer friend. At first she downplayed his role, then later said that he actually made all the trades for her. So he had nothing to do with it, then it was all his idea.

The Clintons were simply smart enough to cover their tracks. The problem was that fishy stuff kept happening. From Whitewater all the way through usage of the Clinton Foundation slush fund that continues today. Spare me the risible idea that it’s just OK that one multinational businessman donated millions of dollars to the Clintons when she was the Secretary of State and Bill was actively involved in proceedings that netted the donor a big contract. Spare me the instruction to look away when even Hillary acknowledges that her foundation took foreign money.

As we look forward to another Clinton administration, we can expect more of this. It’s already gotten off to a rollicking start. Sure, Benghazi was a made-up bullshit non-scandal. But the email server saga, and the Clinton Foundation’s inherent, structural improprieties — and most of all, the family’s total insouciance about all of it — indicate to us that they haven’t learned a goddamn thing. This family is going to push the envelope of decency just this side of prosecutable for as long as they’re around.

This fact was driven home by the sight, a few months ago, of Obama’s Justice Department having to tap-dance around the question of whether or not to charge Hillary Clinton for her handling of classified information. After a story full of hideous, hideous optics, including Bill Clinton trying to glad-hand his way into Loretta Lynch’s favor like an idiot, the whole story wrapped up with the worst scene of all. On the day that Obama’s FBI director announced that he would not be prosecuting the individual who Obama openly wanted to win the election, the president himself appeared with Hillary at a campaign rally. It looked terrible; insider baseball of the most cynical variety.